Pyrite
DESCRIPTION:
A metallic mineral ranging from silver to brassy gold in color, which often naturally forms cubes
COMPOSITION:
Iron sulfide (FeS2)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
A stone of luck and encouragement that helps release negative behavior patterns and promote inspiration. Keeping a pyrite in your workspace is said to help dispel intellectual fatigue.
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen briefly sold me on “pyrite baron” as a future career. In their 1994 TV movie How the West Was Fun, which I owned, along with many other Dualstar productions, on VHS, the twins are called to their godmother’s dude ranch in the American West. The ranch is losing money and she’s keen on selling, so the girls get their dad fired from his job (a thing that, apparently, daughters can do) and head out to help, in the way these films assumed only nine-year-olds could.
At the ranch, they meet the son of the ranch hand and Scooby Doo–type villain, Bart, who has been intentionally turning people away from the business and has plans to sell it and convert it into a gaudy theme park. The girls, as always, have a plan and invite investors (again, nine-year-olds can do this?) to see how wonderful the ranch could be on its own, without roller coasters and cotton candy booths. But on the day the investors come to visit, the sisters’ vision for an enthralling tour of the ranch is thwarted by Bart at every turn. The girls’ last shot to convince the investors to save the ranch is to follow a mysterious map that promises golden treasure at the end of the path.
Where X marks the spot, they discover a cave full of sparkling gold embedded in the rock. For a moment, the girls think the ranch is saved, with or without the suits’ money. Except the cave isn’t full of gold. It’s pyrite, an iron sulfide with a pale, brassy color that tricked many ignorant prospectors at the height of the gold rush and is functionally worthless. The Olsen twins’ plans are foiled again. But when the girls think all hope is lost, the investors burst into applause. It might just be iron sulfide, but the whole thrilling horseback adventure to finding the shining cave is an experience they can sell. Who cares if the gold isn’t real? Or the adventure, for that matter? It feels enough like the real thing to be fun, and at that point, what’s the difference? The potential fortune is the same.
I have two pyrites. One is a nearly perfect yellowed cube, with striations that look like a moonscape in miniature, or like that one Joy Division album cover. (You know the one.) The second is newly tumbled and smooth on its surface, with open maws revealing the ore’s geometric crags reflecting each other into the void. They sometimes look like gold, if you squint, but mostly they look like metallic earth. Pyrite was once my favorite mineral in my small childhood collection, my specimen of which came glued to a sheet of paper from some museum store. It seemed obviously more beautiful than the other stones, bright and bold where others were dull and translucent, like it knew exactly what it was. And yet there was its nickname, fool’s gold, quoted just beneath it on the paper grid. At some point the name registered, and I began to feel like a fool for loving it so. Gold was the thing I should be obsessed with, not this lowly imitator.
Pyrite got the name fool’s gold when California prospectors would think they had found their fortune sifting through a muddy pool, only to realize the glinting shard wasn’t the kind of metal that would make them rich. It was commonly defined by what it wasn’t—not gold, not valuable, not worthy. No one cared that investment in pyrite ore, which is used to make sulfuric acid, would quickly become a smarter investment than gold, as America scrambled to ditch foreign imports during World War I. No one cared that the presence of pyrite in soil often meant that real gold was not far away. It was only what it couldn’t be.
Impostor syndrome was first recorded in 1978 in a study by doctors Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes, although they referred to it as “impostor phenomenon.” They described it as “the psychological experience of believing that one’s accomplishments came about not through genuine ability, but as a result of having been lucky, having worked harder than others, or having manipulated other people’s impressions.” The doctors first observed the phenomenon in women; indeed, the study was inspired by Clance’s own feelings of inferiority in her graduate studies. However, later studies showed that people of other genders are prone to the same feelings of anxiety around their success, as if they’re pulling one over on everyone they know, and that any achievement is a blip of luck that could never be replicated.
In a 1993 report on impostor phenomenon, Clance and another doctor, Joe Langford, compiled several surveys conducted in the intervening years that looked at the reactions among (presumably cis) men and women to the idea that one doesn’t deserve to be in the room, and they found it equally prevalent among men and women. Rather than viewing the pursuit of intelligence or success as a never-ending journey, men and women who experienced impostor phenomenon viewed these experiences as objective peaks that they would never be able to scale.
What was different, however, was how that feeling manifested outwardly. “For females, impostor feelings had low correlations with impulsivity and need for change, consistent with the usual description of impostors as cautious and unlikely to engage in risk-taking,” wrote Clance and Langford, but men “tend to compensate by pushing themselves in a frenetic manner in order to prove their competency.” In other words, women tend to shy away from the spotlight when they feel like they don’t belong, afraid too much attention will expose them as the fakes they are. Men bulldoze ahead, convinced that bombast will make up for shortcomings in the quality of their work. Give ’em the ol’ razzle-dazzle.
Both tendencies focus on the disconnect between appearance and reality; the fear is that being seen as competent doesn’t matter if you know your work isn’t up to par. But the reverse is also true for many sufferers of impostor syndrome—that your work can be as good as anyone else’s but it won’t matter if you’re seen as a fraud. You can be stronger than gold, more useful than gold, more valuable, but if gold is what they’re looking for, you’ll never be enough. When I feel like everyone can see right through me and that nothing I do will ever be enough, I wonder if there’s a cure for feeling like this. Therapy is certainly helpful, but it’s not a cure-all. In Clance and Imes’s original study, they singled out “having worked harder than others” as one reason someone might believe they had not achieved their success through genuine ability, as if working hard to achieve something isn’t the definition of genuine ability. Maybe a person thinks she’s a fraud because she worked hard rather than having it come “naturally” to her, that the difficulty of the task belies some inherent incompetence. But maybe she’s right. Maybe in a vacuum she wouldn’t have that talent. Maybe her hard work was bolstered by privilege and selective opportunity available to her and not others, and that should add a footnote to her work.
It’d be easy to look at all of these examples of impostor syndrome and conclude that any time someone feels like an impostor, it’s false. She must have been kicking ass and just been made to feel inferior by her boss or her boyfriend or racism or, like, society. And who gets to determine who’s an impostor anyway? Whose perspective are we trying to live up to? I wouldn’t be surprised if the women in those studies had some phantom man’s voice in their head (perhaps disguised as their own) telling them their success was undeserved and their competence was just the result of their peers taking pity on them.
But the cultural acknowledgment of impostor syndrome sidesteps instances in which someone is an impostor, or when someone correctly assesses their abilities. I think of how Elizabeth Holmes may have benefitted from a little self-doubt while running Theranos. I think of how we need more men to have the self-awareness so many women are expected to possess, rather than having more women careening forward, fueled only by unearned confidence. Leaning in works only when you know your work is being undervalued, not when everyone has made an accurate assessment of you and you just need more time to percolate.
In 2015, comedian Jessica Williams received blowback when she said she had no interest in, and wasn’t ready to, host The Daily Show after Jon Stewart stepped down. “Thank you but I am extremely under-qualified for the job!” she tweeted in response to hundreds of suggestions that she would be a perfect fit. “At this age (25) if something happens politically that I don’t agree with, I need to go to my room & like not come out for, like, 7 days.” It was a statement that showed maturity and self-possession; just because a bunch of people said she was ready to lead one of America’s most popular talk shows, one that had shaped politics for over a decade, doesn’t mean that she was.
Her fans wouldn’t have it. There was a petition calling her a “genius” and “natural successor” to Stewart, and an article in the Billfold theorized that she was a victim of impostor syndrome and that all she needed was a good pep talk. Author Ester Bloom imagined a room of “old white people” congratulating themselves on Williams’s statement. “We did it, they whisper. We have succeeded in instilling in yet another competent, confident young woman a total lack of understanding of her own self-worth!” Williams responded to the article in harsher terms, and in particular to the implication that a white woman knew better than a black woman what was good for her. “Are you unaware how insulting that can be for a fully functioning person to hear that her choices are invalid?” Williams wrote. “Is it possible that I know & love myself enough to admit what I’m not ready for?”
Of course it is possible. But the paranoia behind impostor syndrome, of being the fool’s version of our best selves, is: how do we know we know? Our fears may seem grounded and reasonable, but they could just be a trick. On the other hand, our confidence could be built on nothing.
On some level, I can’t accept praise. Every time I feel like I’ve earned something, I also feel like there’s an anvil waiting to fall on my head, a punishment from the fates for having the audacity to achieve something I thought I deserved. I’ve largely given my life over to luck and privilege, acknowledging that everything I have was made by others, that taking credit would be selfish, and that the wheel of fortune spins arbitrarily. At first blush it looks like zen. It’s easy to miss the doubt beneath.
Impostor syndrome is not inherent. While some of us may be more inclined to worry or caution, and while it may be natural to feel anxious at times about your performance at work, what Williams’s misguided cheerleaders understood is that self-doubt is often planted from the outside, through structures we all live with but never consented to. I don’t remember the first time I was asked to fill out my race on an application. It was likely before “two or more races” became common, and I had to choose one or the other. Nearly every time it felt like superfluous information, but with some applications—for college, for jobs—I heard a voice telling me that reminding faceless administrators of my Indianness would be smart, that I needed all the “help” I could get. This is of course not how affirmative action works, but at some point I had absorbed both the idea that I could not do this on my own and that what could vault me over the competition was some part of me that had nothing to do with my abilities.
The paranoia behind impostor syndrome, of being the fool’s version of our best selves, is: How do we know we know? Our fears may seem grounded and reasonable, but they could just be a trick. On the other hand, our confidence could be built on nothing.
Much like fool’s gold, the label of impostor is one that’s easy to identify with once it’s been thrown at you, or even hinted at. You think you are real, and suddenly you see so clearly how you are not. And there are so many ways to be an impostor. In a unipolar society that props up white, cis, straight, able-bodied, rich men at the top, everyone else is some form of an impostor whether they want to be or not, a fool playing at the real thing, fighting to have their inherent value seen along a different scale than “gold” or “not gold.” No one has explicitly called me an impostor for going to college or holding a job while being mixed race; no one accused me of only being there because the institution was hard up for half-white half-Indian people. But that suggestion that drawing attention to (or just being honest about) my race could give me a leg up planted a seed in my mind that any success I found in the next four years would come with this qualifier.
Which is why, for far too long, I checked white on any applications, which wasn’t a lie but also wasn’t the truth. I thought that would stave off worries of inadequacy, ensuring that whatever I earned was through my ability alone (which itself ignored the heightened valuation of whiteness that I didn’t realize I was trading on). But the problem with most racism is its plausible deniability. You’re never quite sure where it is, and as soon as you think you’ve located it, you’re told you were just the best candidate for the job, even as other candidates whose race can’t be denied are told they’re “the wrong fit.” And you zip away the voice telling you it should matter and the voice telling you it shouldn’t matter the way they’re making it matter. And you wait for the day unconscious bias comes for you.
According to David Rickard, professor emeritus of ore geology and geochemistry at Cardiff University, America is built on the lie of fool’s gold. The Jamestown settlement in modern-day Virginia was one of many outposts where English and French colonizers looked for gold, spurred by the success of Spanish miners in South America. “The captain of the first expeditionary fleet, Christopher Newport, was so sure that gold was to be found that he insisted that pyrite found near the settlement was real gold and shipped a load back to England,” wrote Rickard in a piece for Oxford University Press’s blog in 2015. Similarly convinced this was the real deal, English people were inspired by the shipment to settle in Jamestown, and more funding from the government. “The operation has all the characteristics we associate with the idea of fool’s gold: a worthless asset believed by some people to be of real value,” wrote Rickard. It may have been built on falsehoods, but Jamestown still became Jamestown.
Is it ironic or apt that pyrite’s metaphysical properties are supposed to counter all the things that cause impostor syndrome? The stone’s name is derived from the Greek word for “fire,” due to how it sparks when struck with other rocks, and all the properties attributed to it involve fire as a metaphor for passion and drive. Pyrite is used to ritually draw money, power, and luck. It’s supposed to help you get over intellectual fatigue by increasing clarity and focus. It’s a shot of espresso to your nervous system, bolstering you to accomplish what you may have been too afraid to do. It is, essentially, the “male” reaction to impostor syndrome. Commonly it’s used in spells for one’s career, surrounded by green candles, or in times when a confidence boost is all that stands between you and what you want.
A common cure for feeling like an impostor is “fake it ‘til you make it,” and pyrite can do just that. The stone does this cool thing called pseudomorphing, aka mineral replacement, in which it takes over another structure, expanding into and replacing the original material until you get something that looks like a seashell but is entirely made of shimmering pyrite—a better and stronger specimen than the original. Another metaphysical property of pyrite is that it can help one overcome bad habits by creating new and healthier patterns. Those patterns already exist. All you need to do is slip yourself into their mold.
In my ninth-grade English class we studied the Bible because, we were told, an understanding of the stories of Christianity would allow us a better understanding of the Western canon, and because I attended a Quaker school and that had to be part of the deal. At some point we discussed Pascal’s wager, or the theory that any rational person should believe in (Christian) God, because if there was a god you’d receive infinite rewards in Heaven, and if there wasn’t, well, you wouldn’t lose much on earth. Which obviously depends on what sort of Christian god you’re fake-believing in, because if I spent my life abstaining from sex and drink and impure thoughts and found out on my deathbed that eternal joy and salvation wasn’t coming, I’d be pissed.
Pascal’s wager raised the question of what to do if you simply couldn’t make yourself believe in God. Blaise Pascal argued that acting like you believed would eventually make it so and, thus, to look to other believers and mimic them. “Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally make you believe, and deaden your acuteness,” he wrote (in French). Pascal was French and Catholic, so perhaps he was primed to see going through the motions of ritual and tradition as belief in and of itself, or at least part of it, rather than the very Protestant idea that one must have a personal, unshakable relationship with God. But as a teenage atheist, the whole idea infuriated me. God, belief, and religion were all absolutes, and aside from not thinking God was real, I also figured if God were real, their omnipotence would not be tricked by your taking communion and saying Hail Marys without really meaning it. If God did exist, they’d probably see through your bullshit.
Pascal’s wager could presumably work the other way. If someone were so resolute in their belief in a Christian god but did not go to church or study the Bible or pray, did not play the part, would they lose their faith? That, I guess, is the unanswered question behind all of religion. The wager assumes a divide between actions and beliefs, but also understands they can be united, one way or another. Maybe the women of Clance’s study were perceived as competent because they were always sharp and hard-working, or maybe they pretended to know things until they learned them. It is impossible to ever know which is which. Functionally, they’re one and the same.
Being a fake isn’t so bad. The underlying assumption of the name fool’s gold is that pyrite isn’t gold but that it should be, even though it’s just fine as itself. The paranoia comes not from what you are, but from what others think you should be, and from the attempt to separate being enough for yourself from being enough for someone else. Pyrite is supposed to give you that extra fire you need to get over your own paranoia, to just be whoever it is you’re trying to be, even if at times it feels unnatural. Because that’s pyrite’s nature. By being something else—gold, seashells, ore that will transform into something more useful—pyrite is being itself.
In tarot, the Fool is the card of new beginnings. Traditionally we see him depicted with a bindle on his back and a dog by his side, face to the sunny sky, completely unaware that he is about to step off a cliff and plummet to his death or great dismemberment. At first glance it’s a card of warning, but the foolishness comes from thinking we know what will happen next. We don’t know that his next footstep will catapult him forward. For all we know, he stops and takes in the view before turning around and doing something else. The Fool is also card zero in the storyline of the major arcana, the beginning of the beginning, nothing but potential. He represents the start of a journey and the bravery one needs to begin. After all, declaring a desire for something new always feels a bit silly. He is willing to look like he doesn’t know anything—like a fraud, like a fool—in order to get where he wants to go.
High-school English class was also a time for the great fakes and fools of literature. I think of Gatsby’s grand, uncut library and how to his guests it was at once proof of his fraud and his authenticity. I assume that’s partially why he kept it around, to have a reminder of everything he wasn’t and would never be despite everything he was. I think of the foils in Shakespeare who fall backward into luck and romance, mostly because they’re mistaken for someone else. And I think of Holly Golightly being a “real phony,” at once an intentional construction of a personality and entirely who she was, the weak shell almost entirely eaten away by the brassy shine of herself.
My English teachers were probably so concerned with authenticity and self-awareness in narrative because my peers and I were busy building ourselves, and we weren’t going to absorb such obvious advice as “don’t be a lying sack of shit” from our elders. But the literary lesson they always imparted was that the real is more important than the fake, that the scam was what did Gatsby and Holly and possibly Pascal in. But Gatsby was Gatsby and Holly was Holly not in spite of their morphing and shifting, but because of it. And though things might not have turned out great for them, I’m not sure the lives they were running away from would have served them any better. Either way, their fates were not a matter of authenticity, or a lack thereof.
Maybe our teachers were preparing us to understand that what we valued in ourselves would not always be what others value. A cave can be filled with gorgeous veins of pyrite, and some people will only see a lack of gold, which has value only because, generations ago, colonizers declared it the valuable thing. The real tension in our lives would come from learning how to work through that.
Impostor syndrome doesn’t leave much room for pseudomorphing. It asks us to cast ourselves as one or the other, immediately a success or immediately a failure, without the ability to change and evolve into the thing we’re striving to be. Code-switching, gender performance, saying things around friends that you wouldn’t say around family—in the world of impostor syndrome these are all proof of being a fake. It presupposes there’s one authentic thing to be, and you’re not it. But there has to be a consequence to defining yourself in the negative for so long, of thinking of yourself foremost by what you aren’t, rather than what you are.
This might sound obvious because we’re talking about an inanimate mineral, but pyrite doesn’t know how valuable it is or isn’t. It’s just there, in the rock, in the cave, glinting and growing. I wonder what it would feel like to not only be unaware of what others think, but to not even know the criteria. To act with only my intuition about what is right and wrong, what I can do and what I need help with, and what I will have to sacrifice for the sake of those around me. It would be impossible, and I’m not even sure desirable, to see worth and value as objectives that can be unearthed beneath the biases and expectations of others. Things have value because we say they do. We create the fools.
